Jon Pilger on Suharto (who is dead)

Jon Pilger dishes the usual dirt on Suharto, his attrocities in East-Timor, the complicity of western governments, in particular Australia but pretty much everyone gets a mention. He also includes this fabulous snippet from an interview he did with Alan Clark (British defence minister under Thatcher)

Shortly before he died, I interviewed Alan Clark, who under Thatcher was Britain's minister responsible for supplying Suharto with most of his weapons. I asked him, "Did it bother you personally that you were causing such mayhem and human suffering?"

"No, not in the slightest," he replied. "It never entered my head." "I ask the question because I read you are a vegetarian and are seriously concerned with the way animals are killed."

"Yeah?"

"Doesn't that concern extend to humans?"

"Curiously not."

Cunt.

Jon Pilger on Afghanistan

Here's an article by Jon Pilger with a great line in it

Or, as the Wall Street Journal put it, "[the Taliban] are the players most capable of achieving peace in Afghanistan at this moment in history".

The article talks about how the fight for women's rights before 9/11 was undermined by the Clinton administration's desire to do business with the Mullahs and get an oil pipeline for Unocal

It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support, regardless of the Taliban's aversion to human rights. (Asked about this, a state department briefer had predicted that "the Taliban will develop like the Saudis did", with a pro-American economy, no democracy and "lots of sharia law", which meant the legalised persecution of women. "We can live with that," he said.)

Of course once they became the enemy, women's rights became one of the reasons for the invasion. I suppose we should be grateful that women's rights were well established in the west before the advent of high-altitude saturation bombing or we might have had to blow the shit out of ourselves too.